The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published August 12, 2023 The Kennedy Promise - by Mr. Fish The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheid , backed by billions of U.S. dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerfu...

On Aug. 19, 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had seized Iran’s vast oil fields from the British and put them under Iranian control, was removed from power in a coup organized and financed by the British and U.S. governments. He was replaced by the dictatorial Shah who immediately signed over forty percent of Iran’s oil fields to U.S. companies. The c...

The fusion of politics, news and entertainment has given prominence to comics especially those such as Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, John Oliver and Bill Maher who serve as attack dogs for the Democratic Party, which has joined forces with the establishment wing of the old Republican Party against Donald Trump and his supporters. By belittling Trump and his followers these comics fee...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Aug. 3, 2023 Red Crosshairs - by Mr. Fish NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Judy Danella, president of United Steel Workers Local 4-200 — the union that represents Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital’s more than 1,700 nurses — stands in a church basement before a room full of her union members. Her voice quavers slightly as she delivers grim news. The hosp...

Dr. Judith Herman in her classic work Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, which we discussed last week, detailed three stages to recovery. In the first stage the survivor focuses on the complex and demanding task of establishing safety in the present, with the goal of protection from further violence. Safety gives the survivor the space to recove...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Test Originally published July 30, 2023 Main Street America - by Mr. Fish MECHANIC FALLS, Maine – I am sitting in Eric Heimel’s barbershop in the center of Mechanic Falls . Russ Day, who was the owner for 52 years before he sold it to Eric, cut my hair as a boy. The shop looks the same. The mounted trout on the walls. The worn linoleum floor. The 1956 Emil J. Paidar barber...

Dr. Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, as The New York Times wrote, is “one of the most important psychiatric works published since Freud.” It is the foundational text, along with The Body Keeps Score, written by Dr. Herman’s close collaborator Bessel van der Kolk, for understanding trauma and how to treat it. Trauma is wide...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published July 22, 2023 Witness - by Mr. Fish Films about war, shorn of the bone crushing fear, the putrid stench of the corpses, the deafening noise of explosions, the constant exhaustion and the nervous anxiety that comes with trying to understand what is happening in the terrifying chaos, are pale and inadequate reflections of the vast enterprise of indus...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published July 15, 2023 Of the People By the People For the People - by Mr. Fish The Republican and Democratic parties have no intention of allowing independents and third parties into their exclusive club. A series of arcane laws and rules governing elections make it extremely difficult for outsiders to get on the ballot, receive exposure, raise money, comp...

According to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, 14.3 percent of Americans — nearly 50 million people — were living in poverty in December. “If America’s poor founded a country,” Matt Desmond writes in his book “Poverty, By America,” “that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. Almost one in nine Americans – including one in eight children –...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Originally published July 9, 2023 When Goliaths Infiltrate the Fourth Estate - by Mr. Fish LONDON: The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support...

When the socialist Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of the Labour Party in Britain in 2015 and mounted a grassroots campaign in 2017 to become the British Prime Minister the ruling corporate elites, along with the war industry, panicked. They conspired with the Israel lobby to mount a vicious campaign of character assassination against Corbyn and his supporters, accusing them, even if they were Jew...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Originally Published July 2, 2022 Preying for Peace - by Mr. Fish The playbook the pimps of war use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with...

Dean Yates was a reporter for Reuters who led teams that covered the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia. He served as deputy bureau chief for Israel and Palestine in 2006, during the Lebanon War and was the Reuters bureau chief in Iraq, overseeing a staff of 100 people, from 2007-2008. It was during his time in Iraq that a U.S. Apache gunship gunned down two Reuters jo...

Redacted - by Mr. Fish The journalist Matt Taibbi has been targeted by the Democratic Party for exposing extensive government blacklists used to censor left-wing and right-wing critics. Given access to the internal traffic of Twitter by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, he documented repeated cases where the FBI and other government agencies repeatedly suppressed news and commentary. The censored co...

Redacted - by Mr. Fish The journalist Matt Taibbi has been targeted by the Democratic Party for exposing extensive government blacklists used to censor left-wing and right-wing critics. Given access to the internal traffic of Twitter by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, he documented repeated cases where the FBI and other government agencies repeatedly suppressed news and commentary. The censored co...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published June 18, 2023 STOP THIS - by Mr. Fish High Court Judge Jonathan Swift — who previously worked for a variety of British government agencies as a barrister and said his favorite clients are “security and intelligence agencies” — rejected two applications by Julian Assange’s lawyers to appeal his extradition last week. The extradition order was signed...

Dr. Cornel West, the moral philosopher and civil rights activist, is running for president on the Green Party’s ticket. Dr. West will be a singular voice for serious social and political change in an electoral system saturated with corporate money and rigged to crush third parties. He calls for “a paradigm shift,” a realignment of “the ideological landscape,” demanding that we redirect the focus o...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published June 11, 2023 Lonesome Farewell - by Mr. Fish Princeton, N.J. — As I write this, the sun is a hazy reddish orange orb. The sky is an inky yellowish gray. The air has an acrid stench and leaves a faint metallic taste in my mouth. After 20 minutes outside, my head starts to ache, my nose burns, my eyes itch and my breathing becomes more labored. Stre...

When police in Atlanta stormed a music festival in March being held by activists protesting Cop City, the proposed $90-million dollar police and firefighter training center that would be built on forest land, twenty-three of the activists arrested. They were accused of carrying out acts of vandalism and arson at a Cop City construction site over a mile from the music festival under Georgia’s domes...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published: June 5, 2023 Go West - by. Mr. Fish Dr. Cornel West , the moral philosopher and civil rights activist, will formally announce today he is running for president on the People’s Party ticket. Cornel will be a singular voice for serious social and political change in an electoral system saturated with corporate money and rigged to crush third parties...

The police in the United States, through a series of Supreme Court decisions, as well as policies enacted by state and city governments, have become largely immune from prosecution, even when they commit serious felonies such as murder. Police officers are criminally charged in less than 2 percent of fatal shootings and convicted in less than one-third of those cases. When officers injure but do n...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published May 28, 2023 Redacted - by Mr. Fish On Dec. 24, 2022 Matt Taibbi was in a room at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco poring through reports sent to Twitter from an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force ( FITF ). The FITF is an FBI-led interagency task force that forwards “moderation requests” from numerous government agencies, including Ho...

At the end of any empire there are always a handful of chroniclers who, like Cicero in the Roman Republic, see clearly the looming disintegration of empire. They call out the bankruptcy of an inept and corrupt ruling class, blinded by hubris, as well as a populace that has checked out of civic life and is entranced by bread and circus spectacles. Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy “American Empire: B...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published May 21, 2023 Run for Your Lives! - by Mr. Fish There is no report, investigation or new revelation, including the recent release of Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns” that will implode the myth that Russia was responsible for the elec...